Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The notion of utopia, and that of utopianism as a world-historical movement, are reexamined while untangling the complexity of its modern association with Marxism. This is pursued as part of a broader effort in constructing a hybrid world-historical typology of utopianism in terms of utopystics, i.e., of a comparative/integrative framework that transgresses the habituated borderlands of utopia, mysticism, and science. In this process, utopystics is proposed as a hybrid east-west exercise in what Wallerstein has called “Utopistics,” distinguishing four (humanist, philosophical, religious, and scientific) types of utopianism from one another. While the latter three tend in their mode of political behavior to be antisystemic in nature, adopting an oppositional mode in the here-and-now in favor of building their alternative realities in a promised future, the humanist type is characterized by its othersystemic behavior, seeking to build other worlds in the spacetimes of the here and now. Using this typology one may associate the failures of Marxism not with its utopianism in general, but with the nature and limits of its specific (scientific) type of utopianism in contrast to the humanist model characterizing Marxism’s formative period. The point here is to redeem the value of utopanism in general and of humanist utopianism in particular in the framework of utopystic, othersystemic strategies for social change in contrast to the divided philosophical, religious, and scientific utopian strategies characterizing the predominant modes of opposition movements during the classical, medieval, and modern imperial eras in world-history.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Hegemonic cultures dictate, in part, by delimiting the modes of dissent. They can position cultural and material forces so that resistance remains within the logical and textual parameters valorized by the hegemony. In this way, even if the content of an opponents counter-move appears triumphant, its form, nevertheless, may be delimited and shaped so that dissent turns into something that the hegemony can anticipate, pacify, and tolerate. Resisting cultures, nevertheless, can and do anticipate such restrictions. Rather than being confined by a valorized dissent they create dynamic critical spaces that escape hegemonic detection. One of the richest sites of such resistance is African and African derived musical formation. Such music create sonic utopias that may be interpreted as subtle alternatives to the musical, social, aesthetic, political, and metaphysical assumptions of dominant standards. By presenting music created by three Nigerian artists, namely, Fela Kuti (afrobeat), Sunny Ade (juju), and Stephen Osadebe (highlife), we demonstrate how their soundscapes are infused by the following four principles - call and response structures, rhythmic tension, a heterogeneous sound ideal, and technical and emotional restraint. This music and these principles move us towards dialogical forms of communication and interaction; ask us to stretch, sustain, and enter tensions rather than moving directly towards resolutions; present diversity as a resource while asserting the aesthetics/politics of imperfection; and highlight a dialectical intricacy where the relationship between the one and the many, between the community and the individual, is treated as a differentiated unity. With these deliberations we hope to explore whether viable alternatives to the current orthodoxy of IR/IPE will emanate less from participating in the controlled modes of dissent and more from the politicized aesthetics working below the radar of the dominant global culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I explore the theory of morality presented by J?rgen Habermas as contested by Wellmer, Taylor, Bernstein and Benhabib, and posit that the deliberative model of moral judgementis a powerful instrument for immanent social critique.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Most literature on More?s Utopia treat it as a serious critique of society. In this paper, I will argue that Utopia is a veiled parody of humanist and ecclesiastical propositions that were inconsistent with More?s humanist conception of reason.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper offers a critical examination of the latest breed of international protectorates, from the Balkans to Iraq, based on findings made in the course of various missions performed in the Balkans and in the Middle East.